A Radical Grounding for Social Disorganization Theory: A Political Economic Investigation of the Causes of Poverty, Inequality and Crime in Urban Areas
Abstract
Social disorganization theory (SDT) explores the ways in which poverty and inequality lead to crime in urban areas.That orthodox criminological tradition has generated significant evidence that the structure of urban areas related to poverty and inequality produces crime.Those empirical results sit well with radical expectations related to the role poverty and inequality play in the production of street crime.At the same time, SDT takes poverty and inequality as characteristics of urban areas, and does not explore their structural origins.In the present analysis we explore how adding the insights from radical criminology deepen the analysis of poverty and inequality as causes of crime and the insights and theoretical assumptions of SDT by specifically explaining how urban poverty and inequality emerge from the political economy of capitalism in the geographic space of urban areas.
Keywords
References
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